RM CC4 will not be supported once Microsoft end support for Windows 10 22H2

[notsogenius]

Hi! We are currently looking into removing RM CC4. Could you recommend any companies i could speak to and get some ideas/quotes? Based in London.

I have spoken with Rm already about their cc4 removal package and going RM unify, i know they do intune but haven't really looked into that option fully. I assume it will cost more and budgets are tight!

We have some fairly old equipment now so will be looking to upgrade the hosts and some other bits however we already upgraded our SAN last year.

Any suggestions for who i could speak to about this would be great!

 

Hi there,

 

I'm not sure what RM will offer yet - we're in a similar boat and i'm waiting to see what they're going to offer our school.

 

I think personally you've got a couple of core options

 

1 - Removing CC4 from your network but keeping the domain

 

2 - New domain - migration - either to cloud or retaining on prem - or a bit of both in some sort of hybrid setup.

 

Every school is going to be different - I'm not 100% sure which way we'll go yet. I'd imagine there are plenty of known providers (I can't vouch for anyone personally) who'd be able to perform option 2 (you're basically asking them to setup a brand new domain and migrate your data across). Personally I'd swerve away from option 1 above as i think it could end up messy and if its not RM removing it you could end up with RM bits still hanging around.

 

Best of luck!

[mikes]

Going for a new domain was the best way for us - was a lot better too without all the CC4 bloat. We were hit with Emotet anyway a few weeks prior to that summer (the RM symantec A/V did absolutely nothing to stop it) so we basically needed to start from scratch anyway - new domain, vanilla windows, SCCM, pretty much replaced CC4 only doing a better job, more reliably, much quicker. CC4 is just a layer of bloat on top of AD/SCCM I really can't see the point in it. We got a local firm to do our GPO's, once they are done they don't really need to be messed with again.

I hear now a lot of places are going remote with intune not even running local AD? (but this might be for those trusts who manage multiple schools where I can see it makes sense)

[Norphy]

Personally I'd swerve away from option 1 above as i think it could end up messy and if its not RM removing it you could end up with RM bits still hanging around.

 

 

Again, it depends on how you do it. If you ramp up a couple of new DCs then demote and decommission the RM site servers, all you're going to be left with from RM are a few inactive schema extensions in AD which won't be touched ever again. There's no RM software left over at all. If you try to keep the RM site servers in place and just remove the RM components from them then yes, I'd agree that you're asking for trouble.

 

For what it's worth, I've performed or helped to perform two RM removals in my time. The first was done by spinning up new DCs and everything worked fine post removal. The second was a complete rebuild from the ground up, as the domain was in a poorer state and a rebuild was considered easier than a removal. And everything worked fine there too, in the end.

[Ludo87]

Hybrid is the best direction for schools to go these days in my opinion.

Start again with the following installs in almost all of my schools.

Meraki Cisco switching running the DHCP Meraki WiFi money saved on removing RM allows for these upgrades depending on size of the school.

A smaller or reconditioned/rebuilt RM server with esxi/proxmox whatever you're using hypervisor OS for basic print servers/Paxton whatever you need to create a VM for essentially.

Sign the domain up to Microsoft Intune do your cloud configuration (use the 7 day free trial to get your head around it in advance.)

Autopilot and off you go, SharePoint for shared drive data, 2fa on login and enrolled the win 11 laptops/pc's like a Chromebook.

Can even send down the WiFi credentials in Intune again now unlike the GPO that got killed off for security reasons.